Tag Archives: Revolutionary Students Union

Salt Lake City, UT – FBI agents are harassing anti-war and anti-NATO organizers as the big protest against the U.S.-led NATO military alliance approaches on Sunday, May 20, in Chicago. On May 11, Gregory Lucero’s mother awoke him in their family home, saying, “The FBI is here and would like to speak to you.” Lucero came downstairs to find three FBI agents, two white men and a white woman, who wanted to ask him questions about the upcoming protest against NATO.

Lucero is a founding member of the Revolutionary Students’ Union, a group with four Utah chapters affiliated nationally with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the past year he joined the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and is organizing to raise enough money to caravan across the country to the protest against NATO and the G8 in Chicago.

The following video presentation is from the UVU Revolutionary Students Union. The presenter gives a passionate defense of the Bolsheviks in the suppression of the ultra-left Kronstadt sailors rebellion. Be sure and watch the Q&A videos, which go beyond the Kronstadt rebellion to discuss the Bolsheviks’ struggle against the Makhnovites in the Ukraine:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism)

There are also four fundamental contradictions of imperialism. Stalin, in The Foundations of Leninism, went on to enumerate three of them: (1) the contradiction between labor and capital; (2) the contradiction among the various financial groups and imperialist Powers in their struggle for sources of raw materials; and (3) the contradiction between the handful of ruling, “civilised” nations and the hundreds of millions of the colonial and dependent peoples of the world. There is a fourth in the contemporary world as Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists have pointed out: (4) the contradiction between imperialism and the socialist countries. Of these four contradictions, the principal contradiction in the current period is that between the oppressed nations and imperialism. These four contradictions can only be resolved by social revolution.

These videos do well to explain Lenin’s theory in a lively and contemporary way. See also their excellent presentations on the PFLP and on ‘Stalinism’.